from the weird-freedom-of-not-giving-a-damn-how-much-it-sucks-for-your-constituents dept

Move to HTTPS; lose the Chinese. That's the revised internet maxim. China's Great Firewall has gradually reduced the number of foreign sites accessible by Chinese citizens... "gradually" only in the sense that it's been a continuous rollout steadily decreasing web access. The government blocked an entire content delivery network at one point, so even this gradual rollout has seen its share of spikes.

"In accordance with internet industry good practice, the BBC is currently changing the format of internet sites from HTTP to HTTPS. This means content is less vulnerable to tampering and specific pages on our websites can no longer be blocked. Recently the BBC Chinese language site has changed to this new format," a BBC spokesperson told WikiTribune on Wednesday.

The spokesperson added that the corporation’s online audience in China has had no access to any of the BBC’s websites for "around a week."

The BBC recommends a VPN to bypass Chinese web filtering, but that suggestion only goes so far in country where VPN use has been banned for the most part. Businesses still rely on VPNs for securing their communications and content, so the capitalist heart of the authoritarian government has granted exceptions. But the exceptions are limited to VPNs registered with the government, which presumably contain government backdoors.

Government-approved VPNs won't be much use to citizens looking to read news the government has already expressed an interest in blocking. And citizens looking to keep their Citizen Scores™ from dropping will be better off seeking out approved news sources using the heavily-regulated web the government provides.

from the hey-hey-hey dept

Late last year, we covered a very odd lawsuit brought against the BBC by the production team for The Cosby Show centering around a BBC documentary covering Bill Cosby's fall from grace in America. Bill Cosby: Fall of an American Icon used several short clips from The Cosby Show, altogether totaling less than four minutes of run-time, and all of them used to provide context to Cosby's once-held status as an American public figure in good standing. Despite the BBC distributing the documentary exclusively overseas, production company Casey-Werner filed its suit in California. Whatever the geography around the legal action, we argued at the time that the BBC's actions were as clear a case of fair use as we'd ever seen.

It seems that legal argument will not be answered in this suit, however, as the court has decided instead to simply dismiss over a lack of jurisdiction. While the BBC's filings had indeed hinted at a forthcoming fair use defense, it also argued that the California court had no business adjudicating this matter to begin with.

BBC argued no actionable infringement could possibly have taken place within a California federal court's jurisdiction because the documentary was only broadcast in the U.K., and while Fall of an American Icon was later available via the BBC’s iPlayer, "geoblocking" prevented it from being seen in the United States absent use of virtual private networks or proxy servers to evade restrictions.

In response, Casey-Werner argued essentially that everyone knows that geo-blocking doesn't work and is easily defeated by the use of a VPN or DNS proxy. And, hey, that's true, except that the failures of geo-blocking technology doesn't give rise to jurisdiction by a California court. Only the BBC's direct action in getting this content stateside would do that and the BBC clearly took steps specifically to avoid that happening. From Judge Percy Anderson's ruling:

That some California individuals may have viewed the Program does not establish that Defendants directed their conduct toward California, particularly because any viewership in California occurred despite Defendants’ intentions and their efforts to prevent it.

Unauthorized viewers outside of the United Kingdom do not provide a basis for personal jurisdiction; rather, Defendants’ relationship with California must arise out of contacts that they themselves created with the state. … Moreover, Plaintiff neither alleges nor offers actual evidence of the extent of viewership of the Program in California.

And so the court never takes on the question of whether this is fair use or not, which it most certainly is. That we never got to that stage says a great deal more about the quality of Casey-Werner's legal team than it does about the protections the BBC sit comfortably behind. The case was dismissed without prejudice, and Casey-Werner could always try to file another lawsuit in the U.K., but it would do well to drop this whole thing and lick its wounds instead.

from the street-sweeper-for-justice dept

How many innocents would you accept being caught up in an action designed to nab criminals? How many good people is it acceptable to throw into jail alongside the truly bad actors? Most people would agree that any action that penalizes the innocent in order to punish the guilty is a bad course, with only truly minimal amounts of collateral damage being acceptable. Now let's port that over to internet sites and ask how many innocent websites is it acceptable to block in order to block sites that are actually engaged in undesirable behavior?

Well, for the legal system in India, that question has often been answered in a cavalier manner, with regular court orders to block innocent websites being doled out to battle both terrorism and at the request of copyright holders to stop infringement. It's in the latter cases where things get really silly, with previous orders issued to block sites like GitHub and the Internet Archive. Well, it seems the Internet Archive endured this sort of thing again recently, as a court order at the request of two Bollywood film studios caught archive.org into its ISP blocking web.

Earlier this week (and again for no apparent reason), the world renowned Internet Archive was rendered inaccessible to millions of users in India. The platform, which is considered by many to be one of the Internet’s most valued resources, hosts more than 15 petabytes of data, a figure which grows on a daily basis. Yet despite numerous requests for information, none was forthcoming from authorities. Quoted by local news outlet Medianama, Chris Butler, Office Manager at the Internet Archive, said that their attempts to contact the Indian Department of Telecom (DoT) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) had proven fruitless.

Now, however, the mystery has been solved. The BBC says a local government agency provided a copy of a court order obtained by two Bollywood production companies who are attempting to slow down piracy of their films in India. Issued by a local judge, the sweeping order compels local ISPs to block access to 2,650 mainly file-sharing websites, including The Pirate Bay, RARBG, the revived KickassTorrents, and hundreds of other ‘usual suspects’. However, it also includes the URL for the Internet Archive, hence the problems with accessibility this week.

Let's be clear about what this sort of thing represents: the punishment of the innocent in favor of an easy and lazy attempt to block copyright infringement. That's not an overstatement. The continued use of court orders to block entire websites and the routine collateral damage are not exceptions, they are the rule. That they are allowed to continue to do this sort of damage even while the Indian government hand-waves away frantic requests for information from innocent site operators is as good a definition of whatever the opposite of justice is as I can think of.

Importantly, neither the court that issued the order or the two film companies requesting it, and ostensibly providing the list of sites to be blocked, are due any recompense for these actions. Perhaps most frustrating, the Internet Archive has clearly stated that not only does it have a method for copyright holders to request content takedowns, but it complied with those requests from these very same film studios.

“Is the Court aware of and did it consider the fact that the Internet Archive has a well-established and standard procedure for rights holders to submit take down requests and processes them expeditiously?” the platform said. “We find several instances of take down requests submitted for one of the plaintiffs, Red Chillies Entertainments, throughout the past year, each of which were processed and responded to promptly. After a preliminary review, we find no instance of our having been contacted by anyone at all about these films. Is there a specific claim that someone posted these films to archive.org? If so, we’d be eager to address it directly with the claimant.”

Now, archive.org was not the only innocent site blocked by this order. Weebly.com, along with at least one news site and the site for a French ISP also had their sites blocked. Still, this damage appears to be mostly met with indifferent shrugs by the Indian government and the film studios that issued this request.

So, for India, we have an answer to the question of how many innocent sites it's willing to harm to combat copyright infringement. That answer, by our litmus test, is "too many."

from the wait,-what? dept

There are all sorts of different ways that websites that allow comments have dealt with trollish behavior over the years, but I think the BBC's new policy is the first I've seen in which the organization threatens that it may contact your boss or your school (found via Frank Fisher).

The new policy has a short section on "offensive or inappropriate content on BBC websites" where it says the following:

Offensive or inappropriate content on
BBC websites

If you post or send offensive, inappropriate or objectionable content
anywhere on or to BBC websites or otherwise engage in any disruptive
behaviour on any BBC service, the BBC may use your personal
information to stop such behaviour.

Where the BBC reasonably believes that you are or may be in breach
of any applicable laws (e.g. because content you have posted may be
defamatory), the BBC may use your personal information to inform
relevant third parties such as your employer, school email/internet
provider or law enforcement agencies about the content and your
behaviour.

To be fair, it does seem to limit this to cases where it believes you've violated the law, but even so, it seems like a stretch to argue that the BBC should be calling your boss to tell on you for being a dipshit online, even if you break the law. We've all seen the stories of people actually confronting their own trolls or, better yet, the mothers of their trolls, but to make it official BBC policy seems to be going a bit far. Sure, if someone is breaking a criminal law, informing the police sounds perfectly reasonable, but your boss or your school?

Anyway, I guess be forewarned: if you don't want the BBC telling your boss you're a jerk online, maybe don't be a jerk on the BBC's website.

from the is-this-really-a-good-use-of-resources? dept

Nearly a decade ago, we wrote about the fact that the BBC supposedly has a fleet of totally secret "detector" vans that drive around trying to figure out who was watching the BBC without paying for it. As you probably know, if you live in the UK, you're forced to buy a BBC license if you have a TV or a TV turner card. And, for years, they've claimed to have had these magical detector vans. When we wrote about them in 2008, it was because a freedom of information request to find out about the vans was denied for the most ridiculous of reasons: revealing the details of the vans "would damage the public's perception of the effectiveness of the TV detector vans." In other words, the "vans" -- if they exist at all -- were more about scaring people into paying, rather than actually detecting those watching the BBC without a license.

Either way, those vans are back in the news, after the Telegraph reported that the vans have now been outfitted with apparent WiFi detection tools as well to go after people watching the BBC online without paying:

The Telegraph can disclose that from next month, the BBC vans will fan out across the country capturing information from private Wi-Fi networks in homes to “sniff out” those who have not paid the licence fee.

The corporation has been given legal dispensation to use the new technology, which is typically only available to crime-fighting agencies, to enforce the new requirement that people watching BBC programmes via the iPlayer must have a TV licence.

A researcher interviewed in the article suggests -- without actual knowledge -- that the system could work in a manner in which the BBC's iPlayer deliberately sends packets of certain sizes, and then the van could use a packet sniffer to look for matching sized packets, without actually capturing any of the actual internet traffic. In other words, it might make use of certain forms of (you guessed it...) metadata. Of course, this is all speculation, and given the earlier reports on the van's Potemkin Village nature, it pays to be skeptical that the vans really do anything at all, beyond trying to scare people into paying licensing fees. After lots of people ran with the Telegraph's original claims, it now appears (thankfully) that at least some reporters are finally skeptical of these special new "WiFi snooping" vans.

Even if the vans don't really work (or exist), it still should serve as a clear reminder of how surveillance efforts are at least a constant temptation for those in power, allowing what was officially put in place for "national security" to creep into totally unrelated areas. If media companies could actually build a van to cruise around and sniff WiFi looking for pirates, does anyone really think they wouldn't do so?

from the dave,-i-can't-let-you-post-that... dept

Lots of people have reasonable concerns about platforms like Facebook which not only provide an avenue for free expression -- but which also have the power to suddenly decide it won't allow certain forms of expression. Admittedly, there's always a line to be drawn somewhere. People are happy that Facebook tries to keep out spam and scams, but it's still worrying when it seems to want to filter out perfectly legitimate news stories. On Sunday, Nadim Kobeissi tweeted that Facebook wouldn't allow the sharing of a BBC article on the latest political polling in France.

I wasn't sure I believed it so I tried to post that link to my own Facebook page and got a similar message:

Now it's possible that there's a concern over rogue dangerous ads on the BBC site -- though for many people the BBC displays no ads at all. It's also possible that Facebook's algorithms interpret news about the National Front party (which is politely described as "far right," but might more accurately be described as nationalist-to-racist) as somehow dangerous. But, just the fact that Facebook is magically determining that a news story is somehow "unsafe" without giving me any details to understand why or how is tremendously concerning.

And, again, this comes just after we've seen American politicians calling for Facebook and others to magically determine how to block "bad" content that might inspire terrorists. And, it comes just as Google's Eric Schmidt argued that these kinds of filters should be more common. Yet, examples like this show just how problematic the idea of these kinds of filters can be.

The more pressure put on companies like Facebook to do that kind of proactive filtering, the more likely that perfectly legitimate information and news stories like the BBC story here get blocked. And that should be seen as immensely problematic if you believe in free expression and the ability to share ideas freely.

To justify the £145 (about $220) annual fee, the BBC takes the line that many of the programs available through its iPlayer service are only available to UK viewers. Of course, that's easy to circumvent using a VPN that allows those outside the UK to access content as if they were in the country. The BBC has finally woken up to this fact, and drawn exactly the wrong conclusion about what it should do, as TorrentFreak (TF) reports:

Over the past several days TF has received several reports from VPN users who can no longer access iPlayer from UK-based VPN servers.

"BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only," is the notice they receive instead.

Instead of gracefully accepting the reality that geoblocking makes no sense in a world where VPNs allow users to appear to be more or less wherever they wish, the BBC has decided to try to block such access, including VPNs used by UK license-payers:

The BBC informs TF that the VPN ban was implemented to keep iPlayer 'pirates' at bay. The company is doing its best to keep company and school VPNs [in the UK] open but advises regular users to disconnect their VPN service in advance if they want to access iPlayer.

In our post-Snowden world, where the use of a VPN is becoming ever-more prudent, the BBC has just provided a strong disincentive for doing so in the UK. That's really shabby treatment for BBC license-payers, who ought to be allowed to access content in a secure manner. It's also bad news for everyone online, since the more widely VPNs are deployed, the less using one marks you out for special attention by government intelligence agencies. What the BBC should have done here is see the desire of people outside the UK to view its programs as a great opportunity to meet an evident need -- and to generate extra income.

from the hello-first-amendment dept

The story of this morning's live "on air" shooting of a local TV news reporter in Virginia is horrifying on many, many levels. Like with many senseless killings, there are all sorts of "big questions" being raised, most of which aren't really appropriate Techdirt fodder, though I'm sure those of you interested in those things can find other outlets for them. However, one tangential story fits right into Techdirt's core areas of focus: apparently two BBC reporters who were covering the police pursuit of the apparent shooter (who then shot himself) were forced by police to delete their own camera footage. This is illegal. I don't know how many times it needs to be repeated. Even the DOJ has somewhat forcefully reminded police that they have no right to stop anyone from photographing or videotaping things, so long as they're not interfering with an investigation. And yet...

Two BBC reporters covering the police pursuit of Vester Lee Flanagan said that cops threatened to seize their car and camera if they didn't delete footage of site where the Flanagan shot himself. "Was too far away to get any good footage. One officer threatened to tow my car and take my camera," reporter Franz Strasser tweeted. "Watched me delete my one file, and let me go. Other officer apologized and said we have to understand." His colleague, Tara McKelvey, filmed the encounter.

It appears that the cops used the same bullshit excuse we've seen them use in the past: that it's "evidence."

Officer Clark says: "that could be evidence and seized." He was telling us about our camera. The suspect is reported dead.

As has been noted before, this is a clear violation of Constitutional rights, and the BBC and the reporters in question could file a civil suit against the police department, potentially winning a fair amount of taxpayer money because the police in Virginia are apparently unfamiliar with the First Amendment of the Constitution.

from the gone-but-not-forgotten dept

The European Court of Justice's awful "right to be forgotten" ruling is continuing to memory hole perfectly factual stories -- but publications like the BBC are bringing them back to light. Google has informed the BBC of 12 more stories that it is removing from its index thanks to requests from individuals who'd prefer that their history no longer be accessible to the public. While Google does not reveal who is making the request, it's often not too difficult to figure it out -- even though Google is now warning the BBC that sometimes the requester's name may only be in the comments.

I'm still trying to figure out what good this effort accomplishes. Deleting factual things makes no sense. Allowing people to go back and erase perhaps embarrassing things from their past may have a visceral appeal, but it's just silly. People do embarrassing things that they later regret. It's a part of life. Part of maturing is being able to admit that you did silly things in the past and that you learned from them. Trying to disappear them down the memory hole seems to highlight how an immature person remained immature.

from the institutionalized-streisanding dept

It's 2014 and do we really need to be reminded that, when you seek to censor something by demanding that it be removed from view, it's really only going to generate that much more attention to the original? I believe there's even a term for that sort of thing. As you may have heard, thanks to a ridiculous ruling in the EU Court of Justice, Google is being forced to start removing links to content, based on submissions by people who wish their past embarrassments would just disappear down the memory hole. The company received tens of thousands of requests for removals based on the new ruling, and last week began removing such links from its index, following a review by the new team the company had to put together to review these requests.

It appears that, as part of its transparency efforts, Google is also telling the websites who are being delinked that they are being delinked over this, because both the BBC and the Guardian have stories up today about how they've had stories removed from Google thanks to the "right to be forgotten" efforts. And, guess what? Both articles dig into what original articles have been removed, making it fairly easy to determine just who was so embarrassed and is now seeking to have that embarrassing past deleted. And, of course, by asking for the content to be removed, these brilliant individuals with embarrassing histories have made both the removal attempt and the original story newsworthy all over again.

First up, is the BBC, which received a notice about one of its articles being removed from search. That article is all about Merrill Lynch chairman Stan O'Neal losing his job. In fact, the only person named in the article is... Stan O'Neal. Take a wild guess what thin-skinned former top executive to a major US financial firm must have issued a "please forget me" request to Google? The BBC's Robert Preston -- author of both articles -- questions why this should be forgotten:

My column describes how O'Neal was forced out of Merrill after the investment bank suffered colossal losses on reckless investments it had made.

Is the data in it "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant"?

Hmmm.

Most people would argue that it is highly relevant for the track record, good or bad, of a business leader to remain on the public record - especially someone widely seen as having played an important role in the worst financial crisis in living memory (Merrill went to the brink of collapse the following year, and was rescued by Bank of America).

In other words, welcome to the new world in Europe, where all sorts of important, truthful and relevant information gets deleted.

Three of the articles, dating from 2010, relate to a now-retired Scottish Premier League referee, Dougie McDonald, who was found to have lied about his reasons for granting a penalty in a Celtic v Dundee United match, the backlash to which prompted his resignation.

The Guardian does searches for McDonald on both the US and UK versions of Google and finds that McDonald's lie is wiped from history over in the UK, while we Americans can still find it, no problem.

It's pretty likely that Paul Baxendale-Walker is the person complaining about that second article, since he's the main subject of that article. The other two... are not clear at all. The Post-It wars story names three individuals: Julien Berissi, Stephane Heude and Emilie Cozette. But none of them are portrayed in any way that would seem negative. It just shows them having some fun by making giant post-it artwork. And the other one is just weird because it's not an actual story, but an index page showing a week of story headlines and opening blurbs -- but apparently whichever article in the list caused the request wasn't directly included itself -- suggesting whoever sent in the request did a pretty bad job of figuring out what to censor.

Either way, both the Guardian and the BBC point out how ridiculous this is. Preston, at the BBC, says this is "confirming the fears of many in the industry" that this will be used "to curb freedom of expression and to suppress legitimate journalism that is in the public interest." Meanwhile, James Ball at the Guardian, notes how troubling this is, and starts to think of ways to deal with it, including highlighting every "deleted" article:

But this isn't enough. The Guardian, like the rest of the media, regularly writes about things people have done which might not be illegal but raise serious political, moral or ethical questions – tax avoidance, for example. These should not be allowed to disappear: to do so is a huge, if indirect, challenge to press freedom. The ruling has created a stopwatch on free expression – our journalism can be found only until someone asks for it to be hidden.

Publishers can and should do more to fight back. One route may be legal action. Others may be looking for search tools and engines outside the EU. Quicker than that is a direct innovation: how about any time a news outlet gets a notification, it tweets a link to the article that's just been disappeared. Would you follow @GdnVanished?

Preston has asked Google how the BBC can appeal, while Ball says the Guardian doesn't believe there's any official appeals process. Either way, it's safe to say that (1) this process is a mess and leading to the censorship of legitimate content and (2) people like Stan O'Neal and Dougie McDonald who thought that they could hide their embarrassing pasts under this ruling may not end up being very happy in the long term.